Kelly Yang says the ESF is a vital part of the Hong Kong success story, as its subsidised education helps create a diverse population

One of the cardinal rules of education is “if something’s working, leave it alone”. Last year, ESF’s South Island School students attained one of the highest International Baccalaureate (IB) results in Hong Kong – an average 36.2 points versus the worldwide average of 31.9. Just to give you an idea, only two international schools “outscored” South Island – Chinese International School with a 38-point average and United World College with a 37-point average. Fees at both are far more expensive than at ESF schools.

I’ve taught local students and those from elite international schools in Hong Kong for more than seven years. I know the English Schools Foundation system works, and it does so because it’s cheaper.

If you take the average student and the best student from ESF schools and compare them with their international school counterparts, the former are just as strong, if not stronger. This is particularly true in secondary school. This past year, seven ESF students achieved a perfect 45 points in the IB.

I’ve asked myself many times why the ESF works. In theory, it shouldn’t get comparable results to international schools; it has bigger class sizes and a higher student turnover, and I think ESF parents have fewer financial resources to give their children. It works because it’s subsidised: by being cheaper than international schools, there’s greater diversity in the student body. Unlike international schools, it’s not just full of the children of bankers and lawyers.

It’s this diversity that drives the students. They are motivated to do well because they know there’s no safety net, no trust fund, to fall back on. When I tell an international school student they need to work harder or they’ll fall behind, they yawn. When I tell an ESF student the same thing, they sit up.

The ESF should remain as it is – subsidised, in English and offering an excellent international curriculum – because it helps drive the city’s success. Hong Kong is what America was 100 years ago; a place that welcomes talented immigrants. Yes, the ESF’s HK$273-million-a-year subsidy seems hefty, but it’s the price of having a diverse, international population, one that doesn’t just help launch IPOs but also helps write our newspapers and teach our students. It is this eclectic mix that helps make Hong Kong Asia’s world city.

The question remains, if the expats without lavish expat packages want to move to Hong Kong, why don’t they put their children in local schools? The answer is simple: the vast majority of local schools operate in Chinese. Not only do they teach Mandarin, but most courses are also taught in Cantonese – that’s just too hard for most non-Chinese-speaking families. It can be done, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Education is stressful enough in Hong Kong without throwing two foreign languages into the mix.

Yes, the local system needs revamping, for a variety of reasons, not least because Hong Kong’s standard of English is among the lowest in Asia. But major overhauls to the local system will take decades. In the meantime, leave the ESF alone.

Kelly Yang is the founder of The Kelly Yang Project, an after-school programme for children in Hong Kong. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Law School.

Alice Wu says US voters’ rejection of ‘tea party’ politics should give our pan-democrats some ideas of what to do about the radicals

The best tweet on the US elections goes to Bill Maher, hands down. His “Tea Party has now cost the Republicans 5 senate seats. My next donation is going to them” is a funny and pointed observation about a group of people who are disturbingly absolute in their small-mindedness, and their hatred for authority.

It also sounds vaguely familiar.

For years now, our political scene has been hijacked by a tea party of our own – political stuntmen who have made anger and hatred the basis of their politicking. They got lots of air time, found like-minded enthusiasts in all things vengeful, bitter and angry, and gained political and electoral traction. In their fervour, they lit political fires wherever they went – burning allies and foes alike – forcing all to recognise them as a force to be reckoned with.

And so politicians began falling into the trap of aligning with them for political gains, which, as experience tells us, may not be gains after all. As the Democratic and Civic parties found out at the recent elections, what might have seemed like a sensible and mutually beneficial alliance turned out to be a bad political bet.

Alliances with radical ideologues tend to turn bad because ideologues, by definition, aren’t into achieving the greatest good for the greatest cause. They are about pushing their agendas and stuffing it down everyone’s throats. In America, the tea party not only made Mitt Romney lean so far to the right that he wasn’t able to get back to the centre sufficiently on election day, it also cost the Republicans the control of the Senate. If the five seats and yet another presidency lost can’t wake up the ultraconservatives of the Grand Old Party, nothing can.

And this is what Hong Kong’s pan-democrats need to think about, too. They have suffered loss after loss – most severe in the district council elections, given that they are first-past-the-post seats – since the radicals of the League of Social Democrats and People Power came into their politics. And, yet, it wasn’t until the Legislative Council election that it became clear that the radicals were their foes, not friends.

They really need to distance themselves from them in all ways, inside and outside the Legislative Council. Wipe clean any past collaboration, like the en masse resignation, and start fighting them. This wake-up call needs to start with never repeating the mistake of Frederick Fung Kin-kee’s previous attempt to bring the radicals back to the pan-democrats’ table, through the so-called “lunch-box meetings”.

There is no political future for this city’s pan-democrats if lines are not drawn. They will continue to suffer from the vitriol the radicals throw at them.

Legco seats are returned via the proportional representation voting system, safeguarding minority rights and interests, so there will always be radicals in our politics. But Hong Kong’s polarised politics can no longer remain this way. To keep this city’s politics from imploding, the full political spectrum between the two extremes needs to start showing all its colours.

Alice Wu is a political consultant and a former associate director of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA